Ch. 27

THE FEMININE AIR

It really amazed me that you should find any satisfaction in [Moby-Dick]. It is true that some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman—for as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea.

Herman Melville, in a letter to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 18521

Despite a procession of ill omens, the Pequod leaves astern the typhoon, the wailing seals, and a drowned shipmate as the ship marches under sail toward the equator. The opening to the scene in “The Symphony,” the lovely, sunny calm day before the final chase, provides a nineteenth-century benchmark to examine how American authors portrayed gender in relation to the ocean and its inhabitants, the salty version of “man vs. nature.”

“The Symphony” opens this way:

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.2

Here Ishmael feminizes the wind and air. Above the ocean, this feminine air is clear, lovely, superficial, snow-white, and soft—yet also duplicitous, waiting, and wicked, as the biblical Delilah who could pounce in the shape of a storm. The sun here at the equator, “aloft like a royal czar and king” is a male god, presiding over the intermingling “throbbing” sex between a newly wedded feminine air and her manly, deep-thinking, violent husband: the sea.

Although described as male in this late scene, Ishmael rarely genders the ocean in any way throughout the story, besides one moment when he describes the sea like a tigress in “Brit” and at the end of “The Dying Whale,” when Ahab declaims the waves as his brothers, having been “suckled by the sea.” Ishmael’s Nature, taken more broadly, is female. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Nature, capitalized, throws “spells” and enlists “her forces.” In “Schools & Schoolmasters” Ishmael equates Nature with the sea, and thus adds to the impression of the White Whale as an agent of God and Nature. Accurately depicting the older males as solitary, Ishmael says: “He will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.”3

When a sailor from the Pequod shouts out from the masthead for a spout it is always “There she blows!,” which seems to be true to the language of the American whaleman at the time. Of the at least eleven whales that the men of the Pequod kill during the novel, all are either male or an unspecified gender.

No significant female characters appear in Moby-Dick. Women ashore help tend the inns and fit out the ship’s stores. As the Pequod sails farther out to sea, wives, mothers, and lovers are mentioned in song and banter, usually in reference to sex, then later by Ishmael, Starbuck, Stubb, and Ahab as reminders of the safety of home. Ursula K. LeGuin, when defending her Searoad (1991) against criticisms that she did not include any good young male characters, explained: “Well, there aren’t any ‘good young women’ in Moby-Dick, but it’s still a good book.” (Searoad is a neglected masterpiece, by the way, especially in its powerful reflections on the ocean, gender, and the literary myths that have crafted our views.)4

Disappointing, if not offensive, to the twenty-first-century reader, several of Ishmael’s references and puns in the story, such as his jokes about the narwhal’s tusk and the ornate metaphors in “Fast Fish and Loose Fish,” equate women with whales and products. “The lady then became that subsequent gentleman’s property,” Ishmael jokes, winking, “along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her.”5

But it is that opening description in “The Symphony” that was Melville’s most significant evocation of gender and the sea in Moby-Dick. It’s a dated, Victorian image: the ocean is a personified male, hiding the predatory, cannibalistic violence under the surface. The male sea can be calmed at times, temporarily, by the feminine air, female Nature. The image is exemplified in one of the paintings that Ishmael in “Monstrous Pictures of Whales” chides for its cetological inaccuracy—but the gender stereotypes in this image of the knight Perseus rescuing fair Andromeda from the ocean monster are overt (see fig. 49).

Yet why, with over forty years at sea under sail alone and so often in a small boat rowing beside these animals in a time before commercial offshore engines and steel, has Ahab not begun to feminize the sea in the same way as did fictional protagonists in later years, such as the wrinkled veteran fisherman Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)? Scholar Rita Bode has shown maternal imagery in Moby-Dick to be as pervasive as the phallic subtleties. So why wouldn’t Ahab, if “suckled by the sea” and so intimate with its ecology, perceive the ocean and its creatures as matriarch, or lover, or at least not consider the sperm whale and the sea as his combatants?

For one, it might be that Ahab just has far more rage and pent-up madness about that white whale of Nature taking off his leg. Ahab is more driven by anger and revenge. Certainly, too, there’s a bit of the general historical gestalt, perhaps stereotyped, as a nineteenth-century man versus nature ethic that encourages a violent masculinity. Perhaps, too, Melville is incapable of seeing beyond the gender stigmas of his time, although it is telling that Ahab’s closest moment to a more mutual relationship with the ocean, as well as his reflection on home and his wife—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her”—is here in “The Symphony.” Ahab momentarily sees the feminine air calming the murderous sea. He sheds a saltwater tear that mixes with the saltwater ocean. Is this Ahab coming the closest to a more familial, ecological, holistic relationship with the sea? Ahab almost abandons his quest. Does he almost bless the ocean creatures unaware? Certainly we expect at this moment a Coleridgean sea snake to come slithering out from under the hull.6

But no. Ahab turns. Ahab sees God’s plan too fixed on iron rails, his life as a predator of the whale preordained, the sea not a place of kindness or equity or empathy, but one of indifferent universal cannibalism, which he connects to masculinity: “By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man!”7